A new work at the Cincinnati Opera offers a powerful critique of the criminal justice system by focusing on the lives of six people who were wrongly convicted.
ByHeidi WalesonJuly 26, 2019 3:30 pm ET
Cincinnati
‘Blind Injustice,” given its world premiere by the Cincinnati Opera on Monday, started out as a community partnership project for the opera company and became a powerful piece of music theater. A collaboration with the Young Professionals Choral Collective (YPCC) and the Ohio Innocence Project (OIP), the opera, based on the 2017 book by Mark Godsey, the co-founder of OIP, indicts the criminal justice system through the stories of six people who were wrongly convicted, incarcerated—one of them served nearly four decades— and finally exonerated through OIP’s work. Yet this is no mere piece of agitprop, thanks to David Cote’s skillful libretto and Scott Davenport Richards’s tuneful, jazz-inflected score.
The action of the 80-minute opera is framed by lawyers—the aggressive Prosecutor (baritone Joseph Lattanzi) and the more nuanced Defense Attorney (tenor Samuel Levine)—who also reflect younger and older versions of Mr. Godsey, who was a prosecutor in New York before he took up innocence work in Ohio. But the exonerated characters are the heart of the piece, and their voices and stories are vivid and immediate. Mr. Cote wove verbatim material from interviews with the real exonerated people into a seamless, hard-hitting and affecting narrative that deftly explores the deeper issues behind bad convictions. Mr. Richards’s score is equally adroit: It employs a variety of musical idioms, yet always feels unified, and the masterly sections for the four-member Ensemble (who also play secondary characters) and the 24-voice chorus each tell a lot in a short time.
Thus, we get the poignant Nancy Smith (mezzo Maria Miller) in a wistful little aria about her much-loved job as a Head Start bus driver, contrasted with a swirling chorus number in which mothers coach their children in concocting increasingly baroque sexual-abuse allegations against her. Teenagers Laurese Glover (tenor Terrence Chin-Loy), Derrick Wheatt (baritone Sankara Harouna) and Eugene Johnson (bass-baritone Miles Wilson-Toliver) witness a murder in a jaunty, fast-paced scene in which hanging out turns into horror; then the Ensemble members, backed by Minimalist ostinatos from the 12-member orchestra, become scientists who sardonically declare, “It’s the Wonder of Forensics! / Gets ’em every time!” (The East Cleveland 3, as they were known, were convicted in part thanks to dubious physical evidence.) Clarence Elkins (tenor Thomas J. Capobianco), convicted of the murder of his mother-in-law on a flimsy identification, is terrified in prison, as the chorus hisses, “Fresh fish!…Clarence, boy, you better not sleep.”
The uniformly excellent cast also included baritone Eric Shane as Rickey Jackson, who served nearly four decades for murder. Soprano Victoria Okafor as Alesha, the OIP law student who searches for “cracks in the case” in soaring, operatic lines; mezzo Deborah Nansteel as Derrick’s mother, who longs to “break this evil prison down”; baritone Morgan Smith as a scary Earl Mann, the real killer of Clarence’s mother-in-law; and baritone Joseph Parrish as Mann’s cellmate constituted the powerful Ensemble. Conductor John Morris Russell segued easily among musical genres (which also included rap and gospel) as did the small orchestra, centered on a propulsive jazz combo of drum kit, percussion, bass and piano but capable of lyricism and sweep. The excellent chorus included singers from the YPCC along with members of the opera company chorus.
Director and dramaturge Robin Guarino staged the piece on a runway between two banks of spectators in the intimate Wilks Studio at Music Hall. Aided by production designer Andromache Chalfant and lighting designer Thomas C. Hase, she used just one large table that got pushed around, a few chairs, spot-on costumes, and the expressive physicality of the singers to limn the shifting time frames, locations and—most of all—emotional temperatures of the opera.
Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).
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